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BACK TO : The Irish in Newfoundland
Newfoundland: The Most Irish Place Outside of Ireland
Brian McGinn
It is the birthplace of Thomas Meagher Jr., whose Irish-born son, Thomas Francis, was the Young Ireland firebrand and founder of the U.S. Armys fabled Irish Brigade.(1) It is also the reputed--albeit disputed--birthplace of Pamela FitzGerald, wife of Lord Edward, legendary leader of the United Irishmen.(2) And it is one of the nurseries of Canadas own national game. According to Irish sports lore, an immigrant hurler frustrated by the lack of Gaelic games set a sliotar (ball) on the Newfoundland ice and, with a poc (blow) of his camán (hurley stick), earned an unacknowledged place in the evolution of ice hockey.(3)
In Irish it is called Talamh an Éisc, Land of the Fish. The term Fishing Ground, however, may better capture the spirit of the Gaelic.(4) It was the teeming shoals of codfish (5) on the Grand Banks that first drew the Irish here, as fishing skippers or seasonal workers, during the 16th and 17th Centuries. And eventually kept them, as permanent settlers whose descendants now account for an estimated fifty percent of Newfoundlands population.(6)
Lying some 1800 miles to the west of Ireland, Newfoundland is the only place outside Europe with its own distinctive name in the Irish language.(7) It has been described, with little fear of contradiction, as the most Irish place in the world outside of Ireland.(8) To this beautiful yet forbidding land, a third again as big as Ireland itself, the Irish brought their surnames and place names, their Gaelic games and language, their folklore(9), music and religion.
Points of Origin
As early as 1536, the ship Mighel (Michael) of Kinsale is recorded returning to her home port in Co. Cork with consignments of Newfoundland fish and cod liver oil.(10) A further hint of what one scholar has termed a diaspora of Irish fishermen dates from 1608 (11), when Patrick Brannock, an expatriate Waterford mariner, was reported to sail yearly to Newfoundland from his base in the French port of Bayonne. But codfish were not Newfoundlands only attraction. In 1662, an Irish trapper and some Indian companions were reported poaching beaver(12), whose ownership lay very much in the eye of the beholder.
At first, the Irish were seasonal migrants. English fishing vessels en route to the Grand Banks called at Waterford, Wexford and New Ross to buy provisions and hire laborers for a Newfoundland season of two summers and a winter.(13) Although female servants were taken on from an early date, most workers were single men known in the trade as youngsters.(14) In 1776, a visitor to Waterford (15) reported three to five thousand Irish passengers leaving for Newfoundland each spring aboard sixty to eighty ships.
Few had previous experience as sailors or fishermen. Many found employment on shore,(16) cleaning and salting the cod on purpose-built piers called stages, and then drying the catch in the sun and air on flakes, elevated wooden platforms built on poles and spread with spruce boughs just strong enough enough the support those--often women and children--laying out the fish.
Over time, migrants became emigrants. Some stayed by choice. Others, with no money saved for the passage home, were left stranded by fishing fleets returning in the autumn.(17) Even so, by 1800 fewer than 10,000 Irish were permanently settled in Newfoundland.(18) The biggest influx came during the early decades of the 19th century. By 1836, the islands 38,000 Irish residents accounted for half of Newfoundlands population.(19)
Nine of every ten came from homes within a sixty-mile radius of the port of Waterford.(20) In addition to Co. Waterford, the primary areas of origin included south Kilkenny,(21) southwest Wexford, southeast Tipperary and east Cork. Between 1790 and 1850, the first four counties accounted for fully 85 per cent of Newfoundland's Irish immigrants, with Co. Cork contributing an additional six per cent. In Newfoundland, most settled on the Avalon Peninsula, with many in the main port and present capital of St. Johns.
Galwayman John J. Mannion, a Professor of Geography at Newfoundlands Memorial University, has studied the patterns of Irish immigration for thirty-five years. Never before in the history of European migration, says Mannion, has an ethnic group migrated over such a long period of time from such a small zone of origin to such a small destination zone.(22)
Despite rural origins, many did not match the desperate profile of the Famine emigrants who reached mainland America from the 1840s, long after Newfoundland had acquired a permanent Irish population and cultural imprint.
(23)) Some were non-inheriting sons of middling farmers in the rich river valleys of the Suir, the Nore or the Barrow,(24) others the offspring of less prosperous hill farmers in the Waterford hinterland of the "Three Sisters."
Cultural Baggage
To Newfoundland they gave the still-familiar family names of southeast Ireland: Walsh, Power, Murphy, Ryan, Whelan, Phelan, (O')Brien, Kelly, Hanlon, Neville, Bambrick, Halley, Dillon, Byrne and FitzGerald. Irish place names are less common, many of the islands more prominent landmarks having already been named by early French and English explorers. Nevertheless, Newfoundlands Ballyhack, Cappahayden, Kilbride and Skibereen all point to Irish antecedents.
At least one holiday tradition was whimsically transformed by the transatlantic passage. Until the early years of the 19th century, Newfoundlands Irish celebrated the day after March 17th as St. Sheilas Day. Her origins have proven as impossible to document as her sainthood; by various accounts, Sheila is St. Patricks mother, sister, housekeeper or wife.(25) Patricks companion, often depicted as a scold, has also given her name to Sheilas Brush,(26) the local term for a blustery snowstorm occurring on or around March 18th.
A 17th Century Waterford folk song, praising the hurlers of Faha Stogeen then domiciled on the banks of Newfoundland,(27) suggests that the ancient Gaelic game was played in Newfoundland from very early times. In a 1788 letter, Newfoundlands Tipperary-born bishop James Louis ODonel refers with heated pastoral disapproval to the springtime hurlings attended by his boisterous Irish flock.(28)
The cause of episcopal displeasure was the generalized mayhem that often followed the matches. But much of what the law-and-order Irish bishop saw as rioting and disorder appears to have been faction fighting, an organized and ritualized form of violence that, like hurling, was a popular recreational activity in 18th and 19th century Ireland.(29)
In Newfoundland, as at home, county factions adopted nicknames: the Clear Airs of Tipperary, the Dadyeens of Cork, the Whey Bellies of Waterford, the Doones or Doornanes of Kilkenny, and the Yellow Bellies of Wexford.(30) Alliances also formed along provincial lines,(31) with Wexford and Kilkenny men sometimes arrayed against the three Munster factions.
A tongue-in-cheek account of an early 19th Century encounter on the Barrens outside St. Johns describes General Finn stripped to fight General Muldowney for the honour of Waterford against the yallow bellies of Wexford.(32) To this day, the spot where the injured washed up, on St. Johns Water Street, is known as Yellowbelly Corner.(33)
A Hidden Language
Along with traditional pastimes, the Irish brought their native tongue. Although this would appear to be a common-sense conclusion, it is not one that has found universal acceptance among Newfoundlands language scholars.(34) The prestigious Dictionary of Newfoundland English, an invaluable guide to the numerous Irish-derived English words that still form a vital element of the islands vocabulary, makes the surprising statement that the Irish language itself seems never to have been established in Newfoundland.(35)
Dr. Cyril J. Byrne, coordinator of a thriving Irish Studies program at St. Marys University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, brings to the problem the perspective of a sixth-generation Newfoundlander who combines pride in his Irish heritage with intimate knowledge of the social and linguistic settings from which his ancestors sprang.(36)
With the exception of Wexford, all the other areas of origin remained strongly Irish-speaking into the early decades of the 19th century.(37) In 18th century Newfoundland, the extensive use of Irish would have been quite unremarkablea commonplace experience of everyday life that was noted in official documents only when really necessary.(38)
Records from Newfoundlands Courts, where defendants often required Irish-speaking interpreters,(39) lend support to Dr. Byrnes assertion that, at least until the 1820s, the dominant language of the Avalon Peninsula was Irish rather than English. Ecclesiastical documents bolster his case. In a 1791 letter to Dublin requesting a Franciscan missionary for the parishes of St. Marys and Trepassey, Bishop James ODonel cautions: It is absolutely necessary that he should speak Irish.(40)
Field research around the ancestral Byrne homestead at Holyrood, on Conception Bay, revealed that native speakers passed down Irish to their Newfoundland-born children and grandchildren.(41) Dr. Byrne learned that Tom Wade, a maternal great-grandfather, was an Irish speaker.(42) Wade himself had never set foot in Ireland--his grandmother, Bridget Riley, was an immigrant from South Kilkenny whose family settled in Kitchuses, across Conception Bay from Holyrood.
Archbishop Michael Howley, Newfoundlands first locally born bishop, has been described as a fluent speaker of Scots Gaelic.(43) It is more likely, Dr. Byrne sensibly suggests, that Howley spoke Irish Gaelic, and was thus able to communicate in a cousin tongue with his Scots Highland congregants.
On a visit to the Kerry Gaeltacht in 1890, Bishop Howley told his bilingual audience that in the fields and on the waters of his native land he had often heard the sounds of your dear old languagethe teanga milis dílisjust as I hear it floating in the air around me today.(44)
Moving On
From the earliest years, Newfoundland also served many Irish immigrants as a way station or stepping-stone to the North American mainland.(45) During the second half of the 18th Century, a steady trickle of Newfoundlandersas many as 1,500 in some yearsleft for the milder winters and better opportunities of New England.(46)
Others spent time in the mainland Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick before settling in Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island or Connecticut. The terms two-boater and three-boater (47) were eventually coined to describe Irish-American families whose meandering migratory paths to the United States had begun with a sea voyage from Ireland to Newfoundland.
In all, says Memorial University historian John Edward FitzGerald, as many as 100,000 Newfoundlanders of Irish descent may have left for New England,(48) with emigration peaking during the years 1846-60, 1880-1900, and 1918-1934. In Boston and Gloucester, Newfoundland-centered social clubs catered to nostalgic expatriates (49) as they negotiated the cultural chasms between their newfound Americanism and an Irish heritage by then filtered through three or four generations in Talamh an Éisc.
ENDNOTES:
1. John Mannion, "Migration and Upward Mobility: The Meagher Family in Ireland and Newfoundland 1780-1830" in Irish Economic and Social History, Vol. XV (1988), pp. 69, 66-67, 61. See also Very Reverend M.F. Howley, D.D., Ecclesiastical History of Newfoundland (Boston: Cupples & Hurd, Publishers, 1888) pp. 391-392.
2. See entry on Fitzgerald, Pamela, Lady, in J.R. Smallwood, ed., Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John's: Newfoundland Book Publishers, 1984), Vol II, pp. 192-194: "Born Dog Bay (later Horwood) or Fogo... Born Anne, or Nancy, Sims (Syms, Symms, and Simms are variations which have been used as the spellings as FitzGerald's last name), her early life is the a subject of speculation. (Her marriage certificate records her name as Anne Caroline Stephanie Sims). It is known that her mother was Mary (or Nancy) Sims, a native of Fogo, but there is controversy about her father's identity. Her paternity has been attributed to several men, including a young French mariner named Guillaume de Brixay....a William Berkeley, whose name was entered on Pamela's marriage certificate....a Mr. Seymour named by Madame de Genlis (Pamela's protectress at the home of the Duke of Orleans)....and Jeremiah Coghlan (or Coughlan), a naval officer stationed at Fogo. Speculation has even named Phillippe, Duke of Orleans."
See also Stella Tillyard, Citizen Lord: The Life of Edward Fitzgerald, Irish Revolutionary (London: Chatto & Windus 1997), who concludes that Pamela was the illegitimate and unacknowledged daughter of the Duke of Orleans and his mistress Madame de Genlis. Despite Madame de Genlis' efforts to present a plausible cover story involving Pamela's birth in Fogo, Newfoundland, to Mary Sims and a man called Seymour, "Pamela always believed that she was the daughter of Philippe Egalite (the Duke of Orleans) and Madame de Genlis, shipped to England by her parents when young and brought up by Mary Sims in Christhchurch under the watchful eyes of the duc's agent, Nathaniel Forth." See Tillyard, op. cit., pp. 143, 145.
3. See Seamus J. King, The Clash of the Ash in Foreign Fields (Boherclough, Cashel, Co. Tipperary: Seamus J. King, 1998), p. 85, and Tommy Makem interview in Eamonn Rafferty, compiler, Talking Gaelic: Leading Personalities on the GAA (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1997), p. 59.
The majority of Irish immigrants to Newfoundland came from hurling's traditional heartland counties--Cork, Kilkenny, Tipperary, Waterford and Wexford. See Kevin Whelan, "The Geography of Hurling" in History Ireland (Spring 1993), p. 31.
The verb "puck", meaning to hit or strike sharply, also remains part of Newfoundand's vernacular; see G.M. Story, W.J. Kirwin, J.D.A. Widdowson, eds., The Dictionary of Newfoundland English (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 394. See also Dictionary entry for cat or cat-stick--"a game similar to hurley, played with sticks on the ice", ibid., p. 89. The entire text of the Dictionary is accessible on-line at { }
The term "cat and dog" (the dog is the striker) survives in Kilkenny to describe a similar game; see Seamus Moylan, The Language of Kilkenny: Lexicon, Semantics, Structures (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1996), pp. 62, 100.
4. George Casey, "Irish Culture in Newfoundland" in Talamh an Eisc: Canadian and Irish Essays, edited by Dr. Cyril J. Byrne and Dr. Margaret Harry (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Nimbus Publishing Limited, 1986), p. 203.
See also p. iv of Drs. Byrne's and Harry's introduction to Talamh an Eisc: "While the name is often thought to refer merely to Newfoundland, it seems most likely that the Irish-speaking fishermen who came to fish the waters of Atlantic Canada regarded not just Newfoundland as Talamh an Eisc, but also Southern Labrador, Cape Breton Island, and the lower part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence."
5. Ironically, the Irish themselves had little appetite for cod. After beef--the Irishman's first choice for protein--fish was a poor second in the Irish diet. And among fish, the Irish preferred salmon and herring that could be caught either in rivers, or in inshore waters more suited to their open boats. The main markets for salt cod were the Mediterrean nations, where the Spanish and Portuguese used the Newfoundland fish in their stews and soups. See Eugene T. Kelly, "A Bridge of Fish: The Irish Connection with Newfoundland 1500--1630" in Eire-Ireland, Vol. IV, No. 2 (1969), p. 39: "You would find few with a taste for such things in Ireland, unless they were desperate indeed."
6. Casey, op. cit., p. 204: "Some, by choice or otherwise, remained in their new found island, or "trans-Atlantic Ireland," as it was known in the eighteenth century. These permanent setters were the ancestors of the present Newfoundland-Irish ethnic group, which now forms approximately forty percent of the province's 570,000 people."
Also Eugene T. Kelly, "A Bridge of Fish", op. cit., p. 51: "Half of Newfoundland is of Irish descent, most at least four or five generations resident on the island."
See also John Mannion, "The Irish Migrations to Newfoundland", Summary of a Public Lecture delivered to The Newfoundland Historical Society, October 23, 1973, p. 2: "They (the Irish) now comprise roughly 50 per cent of the total population of the island."
7. Fintan O'Toole, "A Bitter Harvest" in The Irish Times, Saturday, April 1, 1995, p. 11.
8. Aidan O'Hara, "The Irish in Newfoundland" in The Emigrant Experience: Papers presented at the second annual Mary Murray Weekend seminar, Galway, 39 Mar--1 April, 1990 (Rahoon, Co. Galway: Galway Labour History Group, 1991), p. 101: "They are, in fact, a North-west Atlantic people culturally, and are only North Americans geographically. Things are changing rapidly, of course, since they are Canadians since joining the Federation in 1949. Today they take their politics from Canada, but spiritually and culturally they remain Irish because, as one of them said to me, 'That was the old folks' background, and it's our background, too'."
See also Kevin Whelan, "County Kilkenny Priests in Newfoundland" in Old Kilkenny Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1986), p. 243: "These immigrants settled especially in St. John's and along the southern shore of the Avalon peninsula. Their isolated fishing villages or 'outports' were ideally suited to the retention of their culture and a distinctive Irish ethos deleloped in them."
9. Casey, op. cit., pp. 214-215. See also idem., p. 224, n. 11, quoting from a 1982 article in Bealoideas by Irish folklorist Kevin Danaher: "Nowhere in the world is there an area more closely related in its folk tradition to Ireland than is Newfoundland and hitherto the relationship has almost entirely been overlooked."
10. David B. Quinn, Ireland and America: The Early Associations, 1500-1640 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), pp. 7-8. Note, however, that Eugene T. Kelly, op. cit., p. 39, questions Quinn's belief that the Mighel of Kinsale was the first (Irish) vessel recorded as having been to Newfoundland: "It remains an open question whether 'The Mighell of Kinsale whereof John Coleman is the master,' which hove into Bristol in 1537, or any of her sister ships, actually caught the Newfoundland fish they transported, or whether the fish had been bought in Newfoundland or even in Ireland itself, from other ships, perhaps not Irish at all."
11. Eugene T. Kelly, op. cit., p. 46.
12. J.D. Rodgers, Newfoundland Historical and Geographical, Vol. V, Pt. VI, in Sir Charles Lucas, ed., Historical Geography of the British Colonies (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1911), p. 79.
See also Thomas F. Nemec, "The Irish Emigration to Newfoundland" in Aspects, A Publication of The Newfoundland Historical Society, Vol. 4, No. 4 (July, 1972), p. 17. The alleged poaching by the unnamed Irish "inhabitant" occurred near Cape St. Mary's.
13. Kevin Whelan, in his "County Kilkenny Priests in Newfoundland", p. 242, has memorably described the initial stages of Irish seasonal migration to Newfoundland as a "long distance extension of the spailpin traditon", the age-old custom under which itinerant Irish laborers sought work picking potatoes or helping with the harvest.
See also Thomas F. Nemec, "The Irish Emigration to Newfoundland", op. cit., pp. 16-17: "This is not to say that some small-scale, surreptious Irish settlement may have not have occurred--even as early as the seventeenth century, given the long-standing custom of leaving crewmen behind every winter to build 'cook-rooms' (bunkhouses), 'stages', train vats (for cod oil), wharves and boats..... Nevertheless, there is no documentary evidence of permanent Irish settlement prior to the late seventeenth century, when Irish are reported to be residing at Ireland's Eye, Trinity Bay by 1675; at Heart's Content, T.B., in 1696 and at St. John's by 1705."
14. Thomas F. Nemec, "The Irish Emigration to Newfoundland". op. cit., p. 16: "Following Irish usage, the term, 'youngster', simply meant that the laborers or servants were usually unmarried and not that they
were in fact children or youngsters."
15. Arthur Young, A Tour in Ireland 1776-1779, ed. A.W. Hutton (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1970), Vol. I, pp. 406-407.
See also John Mannion, "Tracing the Irish--A Geographical Guide" in The Munster Express (On-Line Edition, ), December 1999: "The migration from Ulster to America excepted, this annual exodus to Newfoundland was by far the most substantial across the Atlantic from Ireland in the 18th century."
Also see The Newfoundland Ancestor, Vol. 9, No. 1 (May 1993), pp. 4-18, for same Mannion article.
16. Eamonn Gallagher, "The North Atlantic Fisheries: A Perspective" in Atlantic Visions, edited by John de Courcy Ireland and David C. Sheehy (Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin: Boole Press, 1989), p. 100: "These, for the most part, came from within a radius of 40 miles from Waterford city--in effect, the inhabitants of the river basins of the Barrow, Nore and Suir. While some were herring fishermen displaced by the Navigation Acts criticised by Arthur Young, most were artisans and tradesmen. They differed from the later famine wave in that thay moved deliberately to improve their conditions."
For a more nuanced viewpoint, see Audrey Lockhart, Some Aspects of Emigration from Ireland to the North American Colonies between 1660 and 1775 (New York: Arno Press, Inc., 1976), p. 105: "Among those who went to Newfoundland were a number of unwilling hands and also too many 'green men' who lacked previous experience of the sea."
See also Encyclodedia of Newfoundland and Labrador, entry on "Irish Settlement in Newfoundland": "There is a debate as to the capacities with which the Irish came. Lounsbury (see citation, below) states that while 'some Irishmen came as members of fishing crews, others arrived as passengers to seek employment from planters and by-boat keepers. Matthews (citation below), however, believes that the Irish operated primarily as inshore fishermen and 'shoremen' who fished inshore, or worked on shore curing or 'making' fish and that ships' crews continued to be manned largely by West Countrymen until the late eighteenth century, when the demand for fishermen and seamen exceeded the supply from the West Country."
Ralph G. Lounsbury, The British Fishery at Newfoundland, 1634-1763. Yale Historical Publications Miscellany XXVII (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1934).
Keith Matthews, A History of the West of England--Newfoundland Fishery (Unpublished D. Phil. thesis, Jesus College, Oxford University, 1968).
Also see John Mannion, "Tracing the Irish--A Geographical Guide", op. cit.: "Most Irish servants were unskilled labourers, performing the most rudimentary tasks."
17. Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador, op. cit., entry on "Irish Settlement in Newfoundland": "Queen Anne's war (1702-1713) with France resulted in a shortage of Englishmen in the fishery, as many were either pressed into naval service or fled from the seaports and coasts for fear of impressment.... Lacking such alternatives, the number of Irish coming to Newfoundland increased markedly. Since the fishery was then an especially risky economic venture, it was not uncommon for fishermen to be abandoned by masters without pay. Left to their devices, the Irish had to make the best of difficult conditions.... This process of entrapment, however, began to be diminish after 1750, when Justices of the Peace on the Island began to pressure planters and merchants into not abandoning servants."
18. John Mannion, in "The Irish Migrations to Newfoundland", op. cit., 1973, p. 2, estimates Newfoundland's settled population of Irish at around 4,000 between 1750 and 1770, with the trickle of emigration increasing in the 1770s and 1780s. By 1836 there were roughly 38,000 Irish there, "more than five times the number in 1800." Mannion's maximum number for Irish settlers in 1800 is therefore less than 7,600.
19. John Mannion, "The Irish Migrations to Newfoundland", op. cit., p. 2: "The Irish movement to Newfoundland is numerically insignificant in the long history of Irish migration to North America.... Newfoundland, however, adumbrated the pattern of Irish settlement in the New World, with St. John's as the first substantial immigrant Irish urban ghetto."
20. See map, "Newfoundland-Irish Immigrants 1790-1850: The Homeland" in John Mannion, op. cit., p. 4. Although Mannion's map is based on 19th century sending areas, there is no reason to believe that these varied to any appreciable degree from those of the 18th or indeed 17th centuries.
21. John Mannion, "The Irish Migrations to Newfoundland", op. cit. p. 3. According to Mannion's Table, "Newfoundland-Irish Immigrants, 1790-1850: The Homeland", Kilkenny's contribution was 25%, followed by Wexford (24%), Waterford (20%) and Tipperary (16%), with Cork adding a further 6%.
See also Kevin Whelan, "County Kilkenny Priests in Newfoundland" in Old Kiikenny Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1986), p. 243: "Kilkenny was the leading supplier of immigrants
(25%), followed by Wexford (23%), Waterford (22%) and Tipperary (15%). South Kilkenny, especially those areas adjacent to the Barrow, Nore and Suir, was the great nest of Newfoundlanders." Note the slight discrepancies between Mannion's and Whelan's estimates of Co. Wexford's, Waterford's and Tipperary's relative contributions.
22. Personal communication via e-mail from Professor John Edward FitzGerald to the author, April 18, 2000: "As my friend and colleague the historical geographer John Mannion here at Memorial University of Newfoundland has pointed out, no other migration of a European ethnic group came from such a small zone of origin to such a geographically small target zone in the new world over such a long period of time (c. 1675 or 1700 to 1830)". The intense locality of both origins and settlement, FitzGerald adds, accounts for
the interest of the mappers of the Human Genome in the Newfoundland outports.
See also John Mannion, "Tracing the Irish--A Geographical Guide", op. cit.: "The compact geography of the homeland greatly facilitates the search for Newfoundland-Irish antecedents, be they genealogical or general. Conversely, the concentration of the Irish in south-east Newfoundland facilitates the task of tracing descent on these shores. There are probably cases still where all the great-great grandparents of a contemporary Newfoundlander were born within 20 miles of one another in southeast Ireland."
23. Thomas F. Nemec, "The Irish Emigration to Newfoundland" in Aspects, op. cit., p. 24: "it seems clear that the great majority of Irish emigrants arrived at Newfoundland long before the 'Famine' in the 1840s drove a million or more Irish to North America, and the United States in particular. In essence, the Newfoundland Irish were ensconced in mixed subsistence outports along the south-east corner of the Island long before the major waves of nineteenth century European migration reached the shores of North America."
24. John Mannion, "The Irish Migrations to Newfoundland",
op. cit., pp. 9-10. According to Mannion, the southeastern counties that accounted for most of the Newfoundland emigrants were less densely populated and its farmers more wealthy than those in the rest of the country. It was rather the reluctance of the owners to subdivide already viable farms, combined with population growth and the collapse of alternative employment opportunities for non-inheriting sons, that made Newfoundland such an attractive destination for so many.
Also see John J. Mannion, ed., The Peopling of Newfoundland: Essays in Historical Geography (St. John's, Newfoundland: Memorial University, Institute of Social and Economic Research, 2003), p. 10: "Despite economic distress in the homelands, the common assumption that the majority of Newfoundland migrants were impoverished on departure is erroneous.... Some of the Irish were the surplus sons of small but comfortable farmers uwiliing to subdivide the land.... Certainly some of these people were close to poverty in their own land, but others were attracted to Newfoundland because thay perceived they could better their economic lot, and were not forced to leave solely because of economic distress in their homelands."
25. Herbert Halpert, "Ireland, Sheila and Newfoundland" in Alison Feder and Bernice Schrank, eds., Literature and Folk Culture: Ireland and Newfoundland (St. John's, Newfoundland: 1977), pp. 147-172: "In the first place, this is not the historical Sheila NaGeira, the so-called "Princess Sheila", daughter of John NaGeira, King of County Down, who was captured by pirates on the way to France and married one of them. She and her husband, Gilbert Pike, moved to Bristol's Hope, Newfoundland, and then to Carbonear, and her baby is supposed to have been the first white child born in Newfoundland."(ibid., p. 147).
Halpert goes on to point out that a "St. Sheila" does not appear in any calendar of the Saints. Nor, with one possible exception, were any of the five extant printed accounts of her existence written by an Irish person; all the others were by "individuals who took a supercilious, middle-class view of the quaint beliefs and drinking practices of the Irish rabble." (ibid., p. 152).
After an informed consideration of the evidence from nineteenth-century Newfoundland and eighteenth-century Ireland, where one report survives of English dragoons stationed in Castlebar, Co. Mayo engaged in what was clearly a mockery (ibid., pp. 169-171) of St. Patrick and his companion 'Sheelah', Halpert concludes that "it seems more and more likely that the traditional relationships between Patrick and Sheila that emerge in folk sayings and stories about Sheila's day have their roots in the English oppression of Irish Catholics in the eighteenth century. In that climate of opinion, ridicule of a favorite Irish saint would have been one weapon among many." (ibid., p. 171).
26. Herbert Halpert, op. cit., pp. 155-166: "Sheila and her day, in Newfoundland oral tradition, are associated with snow storms, and bad weather in general..... a storm on or near March 18 is often called 'Sheila', but the favorite name by far for such weather is 'Sheila's Brush,' also reported as 'Sheila's Blush,' 'Sheila's Breeze,'
and 'Sheila's Batch.' While Sheila's Brush has called forth various folk etymologies, there are no explanations for 'Sheila's Blush,' which I suspect is a mishearing of 'brush'." (ibid., p. 156).
"The same terms used for Sheila's weather are sometimes attached to Patrick, to describe a storm on or around March 17th. Apparenty the bad weather can be attributed to either, though Paddy comes in a poor second to Sheila on the basis of our present evidence." (ibid., p. 157).
Also see entry for Sheila, Sheelagh, Sheiler in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, op. cit.: "In folk legend, the wife, sister, housekeeper or acquaintance of
St. Patrick." When combined with "brush" or "blush", Sheila means a "fierce storm and heavy snowfall about the eighteenth of March." The Dictionary further explains that Newfoundlaned has two "brushes", Patrick's and Sheila's, "that is to say, storms supposed to be connected with the birthday of St. Patrick and that of his wife."
See also ibid., entry for Patrick:: "It is believed that we have an annual snowstorm, known as paddy's batch on or near St. Patrick's Day." Alternative names for this storm are patrick's or paddy's broom, brush or snap.
27. Seamus J. King, op. cit., p. 85: "So it seems that the first men to have struck a ball in the New World were sons of Waterford from "Up the Roads" helped, it is said, by other adventurous Mooncoin men from "across the river."
28. Cyril J. Byrne, ed., Gentlemen Bishops and Faction-Fighters: The Letters of Bishops O Donel, Lambert, Scallan and Other Irish Missionaries (St. John's, Newfoundland; Jesperson Press, 1984), pp. 70-71.
29. See Carolyn Conley, "The Agreeable Recreation of Fighting" in the Journal of Social History, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1999), pp. 57-72: "Recreational violence is distinguished by clearly defined rules, willing participants, a sense of pleasure in the activity and the absence of any malicious intent." Not all of Conley's conditions were always present, either in Ireland or Newfoundland. In the latter, contemporary reports suggest that fighting often degenerated into malicious brawls, pitting provincial or county factions against one another. See Byrne, Gentlemen-Bishops and Faction Fighters, p. 70, quoting a 1788 letter from Bishop O'Donel: "As for the riots in Ferryland they could by no means proceed from the disagreement between this clergyman (Fr. Patrick Power from Co. Kilkenny) & me, as there have been riots there & in every quarter of the Island those 40 years past & often brought to a higher pitch than they have been this winter, for there is a deep rooted malice in the hearts of the lower class of Irishmen to each other from the great abuse & horrid mangling they have received from time to time in those Provincial Quarrels." For details on the dispute between Fr. Power and Bishop O'Donel, see Kevin Whelan, "County Kilkenny Priests in Newfoundland" in Old Kilkenny Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1986). pp. 251-252.
30. G.M. Story, W.J. Kirwin, J.D.A. Widdowson, eds., Dictionary of Newfoundland English, 2nd edition with
supplement (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 98 (clear air), p. 133 (dadyeen), p. 146 (doone, doonaneen, or doonee), p. 608 (whey belly), p. 623 (yellow-belly).
Kevin Whelan, in his ""County Kilkenny Priests in Newfoundland", Old Kilkenny Review, Vol. 3, No. 3,
(1986), p. 243, adds that Doornanes (from which the Newfoundland "Doones" apparently comes, either as a corruption or as an earlier form) is a "nickname derived from the farm village near Mooncoin, which was an especially prolific source of Newfoundlanders and truculent Kilkenny-men." See also entry for Doornane, Pollrone Parish, in The Place-Names of the County of Kilkenny (Rothe House, Kilkenny: The Kilkenny Archaeological Society, 1985), p. 134: "Doornane, Dun Fhionain, Fionan's fort. Area 417 acres. This district is recorded as Doonfynan as early as 1356 and as Downenain in 1641."
The origins of the nickname Yellow Belly are said to date to the 17th century, when landlords sponsored hurling teams and the players wore colored sashes around their waists to more readily distinguish each other in the heat of play. According to Irish sports lore, King James I of England attended a match in Cornwall, where Wexford were playing another landlord's team, and expressed his admiration for the visiting "yellow bellies." See Thomas O Duinn, An Irishman's Diary, The Irish Times, Tuesday, May 16, 2000.
31. Kevin Whelan, op. cit., p. 248.
Also see D.W. Prowse, Q.C., LL. D., A History of Newfoundland from the English, Colonial and Foreign Records, Second Edition Revised and Corrected (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1896), p. 402: "The Tipperary 'clear airs', the Waterford 'whey bellies', and Cork 'dadyeens' were arrayed against the 'yallow belly faction--the 'Doones' or Kilkenny boys and the Wexford 'yallow bellies'. There were besides the 'young colts' and a number of other names for the factions."
See also John Mannion, "Migration and Upward Mobility: The Meagher Family in Ireland and Newfoundland 1780-1830", op. cit., p. 63: "One of the central experiences of Irish immigrants in St. John's was gradual assimilation and the loss of local traditions from home. For many migrants and immigrants, however, some sense of identification or attachment to home places persisted. This was especially the case with Irish servants who formed county factions in St. John's to compete for jobs or defend their interssts."
32. D.W. Prowse, op. cit., p. 391: "These fights were simply for 'divarsion'; the town was dull after the fishery was finished; there were no politics or House of Assembly, no police office or theatres, not even a bazaar; what could an Irish boy do in those times without a bit of lively fun?" See also Prowse, ibid., p. 402: "They fought with one another 'out of pure devilment and divarsion,' as an old Irishman explained to me."
33. John Edward FitzGerald, Shane O'Dea and Paul O'Neill, eds., A Gift of Heritage: Historic Architecture of St. John's, Newfoundland, 2nd ed. rev., (St. John's: Newfoundland Historic Trust, 1998), pp. 77-79.
See also Prowse, op. cit., p. 402, and the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, op. cit., p. 623.
34. Immigrants from Kilkenny and Wexford would have spoken the Leinster dialect of Irish, which is no longer extant. See Aodhan O hEadhra, Na Gaeil i dTalamh an Eisc (Binn Eadair, Bhaile Atha Cliath: Coisceim, 1998), p. 162.
35. Story, Kirwin & Widdowson, op. cit., p. xv: "There are occasional documentary references to monolingual and bilingual Irish-speaking fishermen working and settling in the island in the early years, but Irish seems never to have been established in Newfoundland and has had little influence on Newfoundland English independent of the development of Anglo-Irish in parts of Ireland itself."
Such a definitive conclusion appears unwarranted, in light of evidence developed (see n. 37, below) since the Dictionary's original 1982 publication date. It would be extraordinary, in fact, if Irish did not survive in some of the more isolated outports along Newfoundland's 6,000 miles of deeply indented bays and inlets. This is not to say that Anglo-Irish, or Hiberno-English, is not the predominant Irish contribution to modern-day Newfoundland's speech: see
Dictionary entries for terms such as bawn, colcannon, gamogue, kippin, pishogues, puckawn, sleeveen, slob (ice), streel, sulick and weigh-de-buckedy or wady buckedy.
For a more extensive list of Irish loan words that have become part of Newfoundland's modern vernacular, see Aodhan O hEadhra, op. cit., pp. 214-222.
See also William J. Kirwin, "The Planting of Anglo-Irish in Newfoundland" in Focus on Canada, edited by Sandra Clarke (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 65-84. Kirwin's theory (ibid., p. 68) that "Perhaps any speakers of Irish were seasonal only and returned to their homes in Ireland", whereas "workers who settled here were assimilated by the English speakers around them" sounds implausible, in light of evidence that there was little direct contact between English and Irish settlers in the remoter reaches of the Avalon Peninsula.
On this point, see John J. Mannion, Irish Settlements in Eastern Canada: A Study in Cultural Transfer and Adaptability (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), p. 23: "the Cape Shore immigrants were by far the most isolated ethnically. Along the fifty-mile stretch from Point Verde to Branch there were no non-Irish settlers, and apart from some 30 English inhabitants in the most populous settlement of Placentia, the entire littoral from Long Harbour to Trepassey was exclusively southeastern Irish. Indeed it is likely that many of these Cape Shore immigrants and their descendants lived out their lives without any contact with members of another ethnic group."
And Kirwin's conclusion (ibid., p. 68) that "No evidence has come to light of pockets of monolingual immigrant families who passed on Irish to their descendants" seems unwarranted, in light of his knowledge (ibid., p. 79, n. 3) of "two remembered accounts of Irish being spoken" in the early 20th century. Here Kirwin is referring to a man born in 1883 who remembered his grandmother, whose family came from Co. Waterford, speaking Irish with another elderly Newfoundlander who used to visit her home, and to the tale of the Irish-speaking fishermen (n. 41, below) in F.G. Foster, "Irish in Avalon: A Study of the Gaelic Language in Eastern Newfoundland" in Aspects, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Winter 1979), p. 21.
On this point, see also Cyril Byrne, "Irish Language in Newfoundland" in Gordon W. MacLennan, ed., Proceedings of the First North American Congress of Celtic Studies held at Ottawa from 26th-30th March, 1986 (Ottawa: Chair of Celtic Studies, University of Ottawa, 1988), p. 7. n. 21.
In order for Irish to have survived till the dawn of the 20th century, one suspects that, at some point, there must have been exclusively Irish-speaking settlers who raised monoglot children in Newfoundland. Perhaps too rigorous a standard is being applied to evidence that is admittedly incomplete and circumstantial.
The impression remains that the importance--indeed the very presence--of the Irish language seems to have been downgraded or effectivaly "written out" of Newfoundland's history, in a similar manner to that of its Irish women and young girls. On this latter point, as Kirwin himself notes, "documents are usually silent on the precise details" of their crucial roles in spreading and drying the fish at the stages and flakes (ibid., p. 67).
[But see Willeen Keogh's Ph.D. thesis (forthcoming, Memorial University) on 18th and 19th century Irish women on the southern shore of Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, which will hopefully supply a corrective to the latter].
36. Dr. Cyril J. Byrne & Margaret Harry, eds., Talamh an Eisc: Canadian and Irish Essays (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Nimbus Publishing Limited, 1986), pp. iv-v.
37. Byrne and Harry, Talamh an Eisc, op. cit., p. v: "The Irish immigrants who later settled in Newfoundland....were themselves representative of a culturally diverse society of their homeland, athough in the main they derived from the Irish-speaking culture which remained alive and vital until the the end of the eighteenth century in large portions of the counties of Wexford, Waterford, South Kilkenny, South Tipperary, and East Cork."
Kevin Whelan, op. cit., pp. 248: "In the early stages, all the Kilkenny priests were Irish speakers and this was highly necessary as they were dealing with a predominantly Irish-speaking population. This contrasted with the Wexford priests, some of whom felt parstorally impaired because they were ignorant of Irish."
John J. Mannion, in his Irish Settlements in Eastern Canada, op. cit., p. 16, argued that the vast majority of immigrants were at least bilingual: "Armed with the language of the New World and having some prior knowledge of conditions there, the potential emigrant was in a position to assess the advantages and disadvantages of emigration." However, it should be noted that Mannion's study focused primarily on 19th century Irish emigration to Newfoundland, the Miramichi in New Brunswick, and the Peterborough settlement in Ontario. The statistics that Mannion cites for the widespread and growing bilingualism of potential 19th century emigrants can readily be turned on their heads to support a case for monoglingualism among earlier 18th century migrants. For example, in 1776 Arthur Young, op. cit., reported that Dublin and the Wexford baronies of Bargy and Forth were the only areas where there were no traces of Irish. And by 1800, the fact that only half the Catholic population was ignorant of Irish meant that half still understood no other language.
Indeed, as late as 1851, Munster was reported to be 44% Irish-speaking; see David Noel Doyle, Irish Americans, Native Rights and National Empires: The Structures, Divisions and Attitudes of the Catholic Minority in the Decade of Expansion, 1890-1901 (New York: Arno Press, 1976), p. 32, n. 63. Doyle also raises the possibility that the 44% figure may not be entirely accurate: "My brother, Greagoir O Dughaill, of the Public Record Office, Ireland, a Gaelic scholar, has done local studies suggesting that the census takers, members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, deliberately under-reported the extent of Gaelic use in 1851 for reasons of politics and convenience."
38. Byrne, "Irish Language", p. 3: "Indeed, one ought not to be surprised that there is so little allusion to the fact that Irish was spoken extensively or that it was spoken at all for the simple reason that in the Irish and Newfoundland ambience of the eighteenth century the linguistic situation of Irish being spoken extensively was one of the donnees of everyday life."
The situation in Newfoundland would appear to be analogous to that in the 19th century United States, where, as Jeffrey L. Kallen of Trinity College, Dublin has observed, the Irish language played a role in the ethnic life of Irish communities largely hidden from the knowledge and ears of outsiders. Citing evidence from Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania and western Virginia, Kallen refutes the oversimplified view that Irish was not spoken in the United States or in colonial America. See Jeffrey L. Kallen, "Irish as an American Ethnic Language" in Thomas W. Ihde, ed., The Irish Language in the United States: A Historical, Sociolinguistic, and Applied Linguistic Survey (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994): "As the continued interest in the Irish language in America demonstrates, we should understand Irish as an American ethnic language that has devolved or taken on a covert role in ethnic life, not as one that has vanished or, indeed, never existed."
See also Jeffrey L. Kallen, "Language and Ethnic Identity: The Irish Language in the United States", pp. 101-112 in Language Across Cultures: proceedings of a symposium held at St. Patrick's College, Drumcondra, Dublin, 8-9 July 1983, edited by Liam Mac Mathuna and David Singleton (Dublin: Irish Association for Applied Linguists, 1984).
Also see Lynn McGowan, "The Irish Language in America" in Ihde, op. cit., "Despite the widespread abandonment of Irish in the United States in the 1800s, a few pockets of Irish speakers and communities managed to survive. Unfortunately, few officials of the time found Irish usage worthy of documenting, and records containing references to the language are rare."
Kevin Whelan, op. cit., p. 243, adds that Newfoundland faction fights sometimes revolved around language issues: "Partly, their battles were fought on lingustic grounds--Irish speakers against English speakers; language is always a powerful identity marker, and often to an exaggerated degree in a new world setting."
See also F.G. Foster, "Irish in Avalon: A Study of the Gaelic Language in Eastern Newfoundland" in Aspects, A Publication of The Newfoundland Historical Society, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Winter, 1979), op. cit., p. 19: "An official communication of August that same year (1815) refers to a 'renewal of county quarrels' among the Irish in St. John's, though commenting that these were 'not hostile to law or govt.' It is very likely that in the matter of these 'county quarrels' the party lines were in fact drawn upon cultural differences, at least at this period. In general terms Waterford and Cork were Irish-speaking, while Wexford and Tipperary were not. Considerable divergence of temperament, values, or behaviour could easily be involved as far as language-loyalty was concerned."
39. Byrne, "Irish Language", op. cit., p. 3, gives examples dating from 1752 and 1789.
See also Aodhan O hEadhra, Na Gaeil i dTalamh an Eisc, op. cit., pp. 196-197.
In light of the above evidence, and Dr. Byrne's findings (n. 41 and n. 42, below), John Mannion's 1973 assertion that "Apart from the request in 1791 for a Gaelic-speaking priest for St. Mary's, there is no evidence that the Irish in Newfoundland were ignorant of English" is obviously untenable. While there is no reason to doubt Dr. Mannion's claims on the decline of Gaelic and consequent spread of English as the spoken language of south-eastern Ireland after c. 1750, there are grounds to question his broad-brush assertion that "English masters avoided recruiting Gaelic-speaking monoglots." See John Mannion, "Irish Migrations to Newfoundland", op. cit., p. 10.
If there was such a policy, evidently many Irish succeeded in evading it. Most of the basic tasks to which they were assigned in Newfoundland did not require fluency in English, nor indeed any interaction with English-speaking masters; monolingual Irish speakers could work effectively under Irish-speaking or bi-lingual Irish foremen.
40. The Very Reverned M. F. Howley, D. D., Ecclesiastical
History of Newfoundland (Boston: Cupples & Hurd, Publishers. 1888), p. 193. Note that the district for which O Donel is requesting the Irish-speaking missioner is the same one identified by John J. Mannion, in his Irish Settlements in Eastern Canada, op. cit., p. 23, as one of the most ethnically isolated stretches of coast. For additional details on this point, see n. 35, above.
See also F.G. Foster, "Irish in Avalon", op. cit., p. 18, quoting a 1784 letter from "Agents of the Catholics of Newfoundland" requesting the appointment of the then Fr. James Louis O'Donel to the Newfoundland mission: "without a perfect knowledge of the Irish tongue no priest can be of profit because the greater part of the people do not understand another language."
See also Cyril J. Byrne, ed., Gentlemen-Bishops and Faction Fighters, pp. 42-43, in which O'Donel is described as "a zealous & popular preacher in both the English & in the Irish language (& this latter I beg leave to observe to your Lordship is indispensibly necessary to render a Missionary useful in Newfoundland, as most of those upon whom his labours are to be employ'd understand nothing else)."
41. Byrne, "Irish Language", op. cit., p. 7: "There are known to have been Irish speakers in the District of Harbour Main as late as the beginning of this (the 20th) century. And folkloric accounts of Irish speakers from other areas of the Avalon Peninsula suggest that this was not an isolated phenomenon."
See also F.G. Foster, "Irish in Avalon: A Study of the Gaelic Language in Eastern Newfoundland" in Aspects, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 19: "During the nineteenth century Irish Gaelic virtually disappeared from sight--or rather, from hearing--though it seemingly continued to be spoken within families in the remoter parts of the Southern Shore and of Conception Bay South, a situation which continued almost into the twentieth century in some cases."
Also ibid., pp. 20-21: "Under these circumstances it is astonishing to discover Irish Gaelic as a living speech lingering on in certain isolated enclaves of the Avalon Peninsula almost at the turn of the century. In fact it was still spoken by older people in such places as Conception Harbour and Bacon Cove, Conception Bay South, until that generation died off as a whole, during the period leading up to the First World War."
Foster also relates the story, ibid., p. 21, of a group of fishermen, who "were often heard by other, apparently younger, males in the boat to converse among themselves in a speech which none of them could understand." The youngest brother died in 1913. The daughter of one of the others is said to have known Irish, which she learned from her parents. Foster concludes: "Gaelic it almost certainly was. They were probably the last people in that region to use it as a general means of communication."
The brothers' behavior would apparently fit what linguists refer to as the "Observer's Paradox", under which subjects alter some aspect of their speech when they become aware of being monitored: "The problem is that, when people are observed, their behavior changes, often in unnatural and unpredictabe ways; aware of being observed, they monitor their speech, which then becomes less natural and less colloquial. Researchers of earlier vernaculars, attempting to discern, for example, the speech of 18th emigrants from the British Isles to North America, face an analogous situation." In the case of the Newfoundland brothers, we could speculate that the behavior change might have involved switching to English when outsiders were within earshot. See Michael Montgomery, "A Tale of Two Georges: The Language of Irish Indian Traders in Colonial North America" in Jeffrey Kallen, ed., Focus on Ireland (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1984), p. 228.
Also see Gilbert Foster, "Gaeldom in Tir-Nua: The Expansion of Scottish Gaelic in Western Newfoundland" in Gilbert Foster, Language & Poverty: The Persistence of Scottish Gaelic in Eastern Canada (St. John's, Newfoundland: Memorial University, Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1988). (The author is the same as the F.G. Foster who wrote "Irish in Avalon"; see Gilbert Foster, Language & Poverty, introduction, p. ix): "Encapsulated within an English Newfoundland, with its fishery-based economy and its significant merchant elite seated at distant St. John's, the Gaelic world of the Codroy Valley survived throughout the early twentieth century purely as a folk culture built largely upon the occupancy and the farming of land.... Writing about their situation prior to emigration, Samuel Johnson pronounced that 'of what thay had before the late conquest of their country there remains only their language and their poverty'. That was hardly true any longer. They had prospered upon the fertile soil of western Newfoundland, soil which they now possessed as their own, but their highly-prized language was increasingly under pressure. The once literate Gaelic had retreated into folk status, at least as far as they were concerned, and was eventually employed purely within primary-group relationship and confined to their locality, a position which it still occupies to a much reduced extent at the present day." (ibid., pp. 110-111).
Foster (ibid., p. 111) also tells of a phenomonen from the Codroy Valley with echoes of the "Observer's Paradox" (see above) and the Irish-speaking fishermen in "Irish in Avalon": "It is still not uncommon to encounter statements upon the part of casual visitors to the area very simlar to Harold Horwood's, 'Gaelic is no longer spoken at all' (see citation for Horwood, below). In the strict sense this is almost certianly untrue. MacInnes (citation below) warns us against accepting at their face value statements either made directly by local people or derived from them that in such cases a traditional language is 'no longer spoken'."
Harold Horwood, "Acadians, Gaels and Deer-slayers" in Newfoundland (Toronto: Macmillan, 1969), p. 20.
Daniel W. MacInnes, "What Can Be Said of Those Who Remain Behind?: A Historic, Cultural and Situational Perspective on the Poplar Grove Scot." Unpublished M.A. Thesis, Department of Sociology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1973, pp. 105, 115.
42. Dr. Cyril Byrne, personal communication via e-mail, August 23, 2000: "My great-grandfather Tom Wade and his brother Mick were Irish speakers, though neither of them was born in Ireland. There appears to have been a clutch of Irish speakers in that vicinity and I have interviewed many people who could remember a lot of Irish words and phrases and place names which were Irish--my great-grandfather died in 1913--and it was in talking to some of his contemporaries that I found out about his having spoken Irish."
43. Cyril Byrne, "Irish Language in Newfoundland" in Proceedings, op. cit., pp. 7: "There is little doubt that the Irish language did survive in Newfoundland at least well into the nineteenth century and there is documentary evidence for this. Archbishop Michael Howley (1843-1914), a native Newfoundlander of South Tipperary parentage, was described as a fluent speaker of French and Scotch Gaelic when he was appointed as Vicar-Apostolic of the west Coast of Newfoundland in an area which contained a large number of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders."
Althougn Howley (1843-1914) could have learned Irish from his Tipperary-born parents, and he was already middle-aged when he was assigned to western Newfoundland, the available evidence evidence does not permit any definitive conclusion. Earlier in his career, Howley had spent the summer months between 1871 and 1873 assisting Monsignor Thomas Sears (see below) in his west coast parish of St. George's. Afterwards, Howley spent three years (1876-1879) as a priest in the west coast parish of Fortune Bay, before returning to St. John's until 1885, when Mons. Sears died. Thereafter Howley requested a permanent appointment to the western district, which was granted in 1886. In 1892, when St. George's was elevated to a vicariate apostolic, Howley was elected vicar apostolic and titular bishop of Amastris, thus becoming Newfoundland's first native-born bishop.
See entry for "Howley, Michael Francis" in Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online:
{}
See also Foster, "Gaeldom in Tir-Nua", op. cit. The Highland Scots began settling the Codroy Valley of Western Newfoundland in 1841. By mid-century, "a Gaelic-speaking population had spread itself out along the entire length of the Codroy Valley.." (ibid., p. 106) Thereafter, the Scottish-Gaelic speaking communities sent out appeals for Gaelic-speaking clergy to administer the sacraments. Foster notes that "between 1866 and 1867, a series of brief visits of Gaelic-speaking clergymen from eastern Nova Scotia to south-western Newfoundland was in fact arranged." A year later, the Gaelic-speaking Highlanders were granted their wish with the permanent assignment of Mons. Thomas Sears. Then serving in the diocese of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Sears had been born on the Dingle Peninsula in Co. Kerry (ibid,, p. 107). "The choice of Sears for this role makes sense only if it were dictated by his ability to exercise pastoral functions in Gaelic. He remained in Newfoundland until his death in 1885, having made an enormous contribution to the development of the area for which he was responsible."
After Sears' death in 1885, he was succeeded by the Rev. Dr. Michael F. Howley of St. John's, who would spend the next seven years in western Newfoundland. His assignment there ended in late 1894, when Howley was recalled to the east coast to be be consecrated bishop of St. John's. See entry on "Roman Catholic Church" in Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador, op. cit.
44. Byrne, "Irish Language", op. cit., p. 7.
45. George Casey, "Irish Culture in Newfoundland", op. cit., pp. 204, 224 n. 7. Casey quotes from the January 3-10, 1774 issue of The Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-Boy and The Advertiser: "On Tuesday last arrived the Snow--Captain Davenant from Newfoundland, with whom came Passengers a number gentlemen belonging to Boston, and about 60 Irish persons to settle in these parts." Casey also cites George Francis Donovan's conclusions, in his "The Pre-Revolutionary Irish in Massachusetts" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Saint Louis University, 1932), pp. 53, 54, 58, 61-64 and 89, that many of the Irish in that state made their way there via the Newfoundland fishery and trade.
Also see Ralph G. Lounsbury, The British Fishery at Newfoundland, 1634-1763, op. cit., p. 259, who estimated the annual exodus at between 1,200 and 1,400 men to the New England region from Newfoundland during the mid-eighteenth century.
See also John Mannion, "Tracing the Irish--A Geographical Guide", op. cit.: "Newfoundland holds a pivotal place in any broad examination of Irish migration to North America. It was the first part of the continent to be exploited by them and the island acted as a stepping stone to the mainland as early as 1730."
46. Not all departures were voluntary. See Audrey Lockhart, Some Aspects of Emigration from Ireland to the North American Colonies between 1660 and 1777 (New York: Arno Press, Inc., 1976). In Chapter VII, "Ireland and Newfoundland in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries", pp. 98-113, Lockhart presents compelling evidence (p. 102) that considerable numbers of Newfoundland laborers were taken away at the end of each fishing season: "The chief villians in this matter appear to have been the New Englanders who, with characteristic Yankee opportunism, induced labourers to contract debts and then sold them as indented servants to masters of sloops bound for the mainland. In time over 1,000 men were being enticed away from Newfoundland each year. All efforts to stop this traffic were in vain and it continued, in fact, until 1775." See also Lockhart, ibid., p. 112: "In some years as many as 1,500 men, including Irish migrants, were taken from the British fisheries."
Also, from 1831 onwards the main currents of Irish emigration began to bypass Newfoundland. See Thomas F. Nemec, "The Irish Emigration to Newfoundland" in Aspects, op. cit., p. 23: "This shift was linked in turn to a shift in the main shipping lanes of Atlantic commerce. As Mannion describes the situation, timber had displaced cod in the War's aftermath as the primary component of British North American trade with the British Isles. Consequently, St. John's was replaced by St. John, New Brunswick and Quebec as the chief disembarkation point since thousands of Irish sought cheap transport on the timber ships trafficking with those ports."
47. Cyril Byrne, personal communication via e-mail, September 03, 2000: "The term 'two-boaters' is a piece of jargon from the Atlantic Irish Studies circle which must be credited to the famous 'anon'. However, I feel safe to say that it first arose in the context of Irish double migration--from Ireland to Newfoundland, where Irish people stayed for a period to make sufficient money to travel on to the other parts of British North America or the United States; or from Ireland to Newfoundland to Atlantic Canada, to British North America or the U.S., in which case(s) they could be triple boaters."
48. John Edward FitzGerald, Memorial University of Newfoundland: April 17, 2000 e-mail messsage to Patrick O'Sullivan, co-ordinator of the Irish-Diaspora Studies web site at the University of Bradford, UK. "These Irish first migrated to Newfoundland starting in the 1700s, and the migrations ended in about 1830. By the mid-1800s, these Irish were as much Newfoundlanders as they were Irish, but American migration historians don't seem to tell the difference, or don't seem to distinguish between an Irish immigrant getting off the boat in 1848 in Boston and his neighbor getting off the boat, an Irish Newfoundlander whose family lived here three or four generations before moving stateside."
See Edward-Vincent Chafe, "A New Life on Uncle Sam's Farm: Newfoundlanders in Massachusetts, 1846-1859", unpub. M.A. Thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1984.
Also William George Reeves, "Our Yankee Cousins: Modernization and the Newfoundland-American Relationship, 1889-1910", unpub. Ph.D Thesis, University of Maine at Orono, 1987.
49. John Edward FitzGerald, op. cit.: "We know all about thr Newfoundlanders in Boston--they had a Terra Nova Club, and annual soirees attended by Newfoundland expats."
Although Boston was the favored destination, not all Newfoundlanders went or remained there. The term "Boston States" is still used by Newfoundlanders, and others from the Canadian Maritimes, as a synonym for New England.
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